Very very cool. I'm not sure about the r...maybe if you connect it at the top with a thin piece like on the e?

*speechless*

Killer stuff.

Whatever is going on at FontShop, I really don't like this new system of awarding 20 Top Picks in a single go and nothing for a while after. I really liked it when Stewf was right on top of things, awarding Top Picks as they came. I mean, this FontStruction should have been a Top Pick hours ago.

Gobsmaken again. kix you are the man. This is beyond wonderful.

@thalamic: All I can say right now is that your voice is being heard. As we explained elsewhere, FontStruct is in a transition phase in which many tasks are being passed over to me. I hope to be able to select Top Picks on a daily basis, as you expect, but I'm not there yet. Please bear in mind that I have other tasks on my plate.

@everyone: I agree that Terence Kill deserves a Top Pick – it is a very beautiful modern interpretation of Fraktur lettershapes, and a very usable design. At the same time, it seems to me that this work in unfinished – most UC letters, as well as all numbers, punctuation glyphs etc are still missing. This makes the current version of Terence Kill not-so-usable as a font. To me this is a good reason not to give a Top Pick for this one *yet*, but I would love to hear what you guys think...

It is very nice to be top picked. I wonder if there's a case to be made for other sorts of mention, though.

Very few of my designs get fully finished -- most don't even make it to the full basic set let alone the extended set before I'm on to the next thing. Forget about the quality, feel the width. And so many of them shouldn't really have been top-picked, I suppose.

In my case it's the idea that matters, and if I can get that down I'm more or less happy. Then I can dismiss it from my mind. Some wag accused me of fontoholism. Guilty, as charged, M'Lud. The bricks made me do it.

Maybe you could instigate an honourable mention gold star instead for flibbertigibbets like myself who aim at not in the pan.

I like the idea of the top pick because the voting system is broken.

Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “Terence Kill” is now a Top Pick.

@ kix - excellent design. you back blackletter look so easy, dude.

re - pink dot/voting - i agree with thal. i think voting is broken here. too many automatic downvoters. but irony, many downvoters go after the pink dots. so it's catch 22. i guess no one will ever be happy with whatever system is used. to be acknowledged with a pink dot and dls is a lot makes up for having to deal with our resident font trolls :)

*confused*

This is looking so great that I couldn't resist... Top Picked!

Very cool to see the caps developing. I can also see that you adjusted the r as suggested by @emepar7 – better now, I think. Maybe you could also try changing the top of c and s too, for consistency?

@intaglio I understand what you say, most of my typefaces are also still unfinished. Creativity and originality are definetely very important in type design. But so are also thinking about the users of fonts and their needs. As a user I find it very disappointing when a font doesn't have the glyphs I need.

What if we create separate seals for “originality” and “completeness/usefullness”? Let's brainstorm! :-)

@aphoria: Why do you think that the voting system is broken? It seems to be working fine for me.

This is looking real strong and muscular, Kix. California Beach indeed. It's Germany by way of Los Angeles. That cap 'S' is a real work of art.

Re: Brainstorming The Legendary Pink Dots, what if an award of a Pink Dot meant that a user could not rate that particular fontstruction less then a certain number, say 4 or 5. Essentially, the Pink Dot is an editors pick and this would say, "we the editors of Fontstruct deem this fontstruction to be at least 4/10 stars" (or whatever). If low votes (>4) were accrued before the awarding of the Pink Dot, they would be thrown out. Users could still down vote the font but the bottom for Top Picks would be weighted differently then non-top picked fontstructions.

@ aphoria - sorry giving wrong attribution - i agree with you about voting being "broken" - broken in the sense of being flawed by allowing trolls to downvote good fonts (mind you, i'm sure not all of these trolls are just wayward members, but probably some who want to keep their fonts higher than others.)

@ afrojet - i love your idea. this downvoting is really a pisser. but by establishing a bottom, i think it would still allow the trolls to downvote, but perhaps would also deter them a bit.

@ gf - i like your idea too - have sub-categories to vote within to determine overall vote. i think if you made it a little harder to vote (more categories) maybe less trolls would vote because of the extra clicks involved. i think also it would be nice to evolve the existing tabs (what's new, top picks, everything) - maybe add top downloads, top downloads for the week/month/year. i used to be able to use the filters for this, but that functionality no longer works and for those not familiar with the system, it might be easier to just have a tab to click on for those listings :)

This Font is really great; I love this type of futuristic blackletter fonts.

As for the discussion going on: Voting is totally broken! Although it is a democratic tool, it fails to demonstrate the quality of a font unless there are at least 10 “correct/impartial” votes in 12 total votes.
I value Top picking even higher than comments and I stopped caring about the votes my fonts have for some time now.

Ps: a forum, my kingdom for a forum…

This is gonna be awesome. I'm already thinking of what I can use it on. It's rare to have a modern Blackletter than looks so cool.

Wow! Awesome!
You really catch the essence of Old Blackletters and bring up to modern times...

It's coming along very nicely. It's fun to watch. See, there's a case to be made for releasing fonts before they are finished. Then we can watch the creative process as it happens.

Well said, intaglio. It's not only fun to see the fonts develop, I think it's also good for the designer to get feedback during the process.

@kix: I prefer the new, closed c because it is consistent with related shapes like g q and e. It's a good idea to make tests with variations like closed/open shapes for comparison, like you did.

Thanks for letting us use your yard. :-)

* * *

And thanks everyone for the suggestions.

I find afrojet's idea ingenious, but I'm not sure if it's good to mix the two different systems.

I like funk_king's suggestion that voting should take more than just one click. Voters could be asked to think about what they like in a design: originality, execution, completeness, usefulness etc. This data could then be used to structure the gallery and improve the browsing experience.

I think the claim for a forum is also legitimate. Right now every user has his/her yard (or better, every FontStruction has a yard), but there is no common place like a “public square” or a “bazaar” where users can interact and discuss about more general topics.

I'm going to Berlin next week for a big meeting with Rob. I'm taking notes of all your suggestions, keep them coming!

When I said the voting system was broken, I didn't mean the voting mechanism, but rather the idea of it. It's far to easy for drive-by viewers to give extremely low votes to good fonts.

If a font has a small number of total votes, a couple of 1s easily knock the average down. I have no way to prove it, but I have a strong suspicion that the same 1 or 2 people give me a 1 on every font I release.

It would be a major reworking of the system, but if it were possible, I thinking emulating the voting system from stackoverflow.com would be great. There everything is an up-vote or down-vote. Up-votes cost nothing to give and increase the reputation (score) of the receiver. Down-votes subtract from the reputation of the receiver, but more importantly, they also subtract from the reputation of the voter. At stackoverflow, A down-vote subtracts 2 points from the receiver and 1 point from the voter. So, there is a mild disincentive to down-vote something.

That may be overly complex for our needs though. Perhaps we should only have up-votes. If you really like a particular font, give it an up-vote.

Keeping the Top Picks is important because they come from an "authoritaive source". I just think it is really incongruent to have a font with a Top Pick and vote average of 5.

On other matters...A forum would be awesome. How do all you guys track different conversations here now? I subscribe to the RSS feeds for the fonts I want to follow, but that gets a little tiring. I wish there was a way I could subscribe to everything by particular designers. That would make it a little easier at least.

I don't mean to pressure you, but are you planning on finishing this? I'm dying to use it, but at the mo It's worse than a strip joint, you can see the goods, but you can't touch the goods! :-)

PS I agree with Aphoria's idea, sounds like a better voting system.

Wow! A 10, of course. Maybe this is part of the future of blackletter.

first of all: freaking beautiful and stylish font again. kix, i'm starting to worry about your social life, your rate of releasing such great fonts is just to high to do much more than sit in front of the computer...;)
(kidding, keep up the awesome work!!!:P)

as for the discussion about rating, top picks and so on: i definitely agree that something has to change there. the actual problem is probably not the system itself, but just the huge overload of fontstructions being released, most of which are - honestly speaking - junk. if you catch a bad time to release your font (like early in the weekend), it just gets drowned by 100 "junkfonts" and no one ever sees it again... leaving you with no chance to bring it back up again but to beg for a top pick (which makes you feel stupid; did it anyway just now:P) and hope someone's gonna stumble upon it somewhen and give it a good vote. the later is rather improbable if you're not a very active member and people don't click on your profile very often.

so maybe the threshold for publishing fonts should be set higher, be it the requirement of at least a complete set from A to Z, or an confirmation by admins to ensure at least basic quality standards before actually being released. (maybe replace the "share this with everyone" with a "suggest this font for publishing".) but i can definitely also see the administrative and idealistic problems with such limitations.

the phenomenon of downvoting is definitely very annoying and frustrating. a possible solution could be not to count statistically too diverging votes. (like if there's a 1 among many 7 to 10s). that would only work after a certain number of votes though. and it would not solve the problem that most people (even very honnest citizens of this beloved community;)) anyway seem to vote in relativity to the current rating, giving for example in all good faith 10s to fonts that would only deserve 8s, just because they are currently rated at 7. i myself try to vote more or less systematically (6 possible points for style, 2 for consistency, 2 for number of characters or something like that). i like the system suggested by aphoria as well, sounds very cool...

but well... in the end you just need the name to get the fame... constant good work and participation normally get rewarded, as it is the case for all the people discussing here.;) (ok, i'm a bootlicker)

if you catch a bad time to release your font (like early in the weekend), it just gets drowned by 100 "junkfonts" and no one ever sees it again

Only a few characters to go, nudge nudge. Got a job, drooling like a hungry dog waiting to be fed on Terence Kill.

Huge thanks for finishing this.
Let me start by saying that without doubt this is one of my favourite fonts on Fontstruct.
Upon using it however, a few visual problems cropped up, so I decided to change a few characters to give it a more consistent feel and colour.
I'm sure you've already tried a few of these, as Black Letter fonts always lend themselves to a vast array of possibilities.

I changed the following (Some have up to 3 variations):-
A,B,C,D,E,G,H,J,K,L,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z
Then tweaked all the remaining capitals, as I wasn't keen on the width of the top left slash.

Hope this helps.

Great suggestions, nippa.

Kix, please consider making more glyphs: punctuation, accented letters, an ß... this one definitely deserves the effort.

@ Kix.
Feel free to use what you like, thanks for sharing in the first place.
I also agree with Gustavo, it deserves a full set.

I effing love this!